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In the
1930s, Walter Benjamin wrote, "From a photographic plate, for example, one can
make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ [echten] print makes no sense.”[1]
Here, Benjamin draws upon a commonly held understanding of authenticity as defined
in opposition to that which is ubiquitous and fungible. As Lionel Trilling has
written, in nineteenth-century thought, "It was the mechanical principle, quite
as much as the acquisitive principle – the two are of course intimately
connected – which was felt to be the enemy of being, the source of
inauthenticity.”[2]
Film was a mechanical copy twice over: a copy of profilmic reality lacking the
discernible presence of the artist’s hand and a reproducible medium lacking an
original. It transformed the fabrication of images, an activity once associated
with the authentic ideal, into something subject to the division of labour that
produced a commodity for the masses. In other words, the film image was
inauthenticity exemplified.

Benjamin
wrote at a time when there was a reasonable expectation that the capacity for
reproduction inherent in photographic media would be actualized without
restriction – why wouldn’t it be? Today, however, the situation appears rather
different; to ask for an "authentic print” makes very much sense, indeed. My
article, "Original Copies: How Film and Video Became Art Objects,” traces the
history of the limited edition model of distribution in artists’ cinema as one
site at which the reproducibility of the moving image is denied in an effort to
endow it with the rarity and authenticity proper to the traditional work of art.
Whereas the rental model that had been dominant in experimental film throughout
most of the twentieth century privileged access, the editioning model that has
been increasingly adopted since the 1990s is above all concerned with contractually
regulated scarcity. By legally restricting the number of certified copies that
may be produced of a given work, it quashes the reproducibility of the moving
image and, as a corollary, its ability to circulate widely. This loss in turn generates
a gain: authenticity and viability on the art market. Of course, the particular
form of authenticity at stake here is quite far removed from Trilling’s
description of a Romantic conception of authenticity as an anti-technological,
premodern wholeness. So too is it markedly different from Adorno’s notion of
genuine authenticity as residing in the registration of transience, in the
"scars of damage and disruption” that index the impossibility of ever returning
to a purity of origins.[3]
Rather, what one finds in the practice of editioning is a form of authenticity
that is philosophically false while nonetheless possessing a real market utility.

Are
there other deployments of the moving image, beyond the limited edition, that
make a claim for authenticity through the strategic deployment of rarity? A comment
from one of my article’s invaluable peer reviewers cautioned me about too
uncritically parroting the presumption of infinite copying without loss that is
embedded in Benjamin’s famous essay. What about wear and tear on negatives?
What about the obsolescence of particular film stocks, or of photochemical film
itself? Sometimes, there are very real, material barriers that prevent copies
from being made. The reader’s comment made me not only adjust the wording of
the passage in question, but also got me thinking about what other kinds of
rarity and unavailability might exist in artists’ cinema beyond the financial
motivations of the limited edition. In addition to the material questions the reviewer
raised, I began to think about what kinds of aesthetic and/or conceptual
considerations might lead to a strategic denial of the reproducibility of the
moving image. Why and how do artists and filmmakers decide to limit the
circulation of their work for reasons other than financial gain? What other
forms of scarcity exist alongside the artificial scarcity of the limited
edition?

My
research since the completion of "Original Copies” has begun to explore these
questions. Next to the editioning model, perhaps the most common refusal of
reproducibility is to be found in those filmmakers who chose to not issue their
films on digital formats. In this paradigm, "authentic print” is no longer a
contradiction in terms but rather a pleonasm, for any print is authentic just
by virtue of being one. The locus of the moving image’s inauthenticity here
moves away from the existence of multiple prints and towards the act of
transcoding, which is seen as a betrayal of the specificity and historicity of
analogue film. Authenticity remains a matter of reproducibility, as it was for
Benjamin, but the terms have shifted from a discussion of reproducibility tout
court to one that differentiates between simple duplication and format
shifting.

Keeping
with this attachment to photochemical film, one also sees a form of rarity
result from the artisanal processes used by a filmmaker like Luther Price. In
his After the Garden series, Price buries found footage in his yard to
rot and accumulate mold, then unearths it to scratch and paint on, producing
one-of-a-kind prints like After the Garden: Dusty Ricket (2007) and After
the Garden: Silking (2010). Notoriously difficult to project due to the
accumulated grime, the uniqueness of these fragile prints is compounded by the
manner in which they change from screening to screening as they make their
tortured way through projectors built for film material altogether less
irregular and worked upon. The singularity of a Price screening is thus double:
in the form of the print, one encounters a unique object, but in the event of
the projection, one partakes in a unique event.

In
1992’s Sound Theory, Sound Practice, Rick Altman wrote of the necessity
of breaking away from a text-centered approach to instead consider cinema as an
event characterized by attributes such as "multiplicity,
three-dimensionality, materiality, heterogeneity, intersection, performance,
multi-discursivity, instability, mediation, choice, diffusion, and
interchange.”[4]
This is, of course, a method that one might very productively deploy in
relation to any film. However, when dealing with questions of rarity,
the importance of considering cinema as event becomes greater than ever. In a
work like Gregory Markopoulos’ Eniaios (1948–c.1990) – an eighty-hour
film cycle made to be projected only in a single field in the Peloponnese –
text becomes indistinguishable from context. Only six prints of Paolo Cherchi
Usai’s Passio (2006) were made, each differently hand-coloured, before
the negative was destroyed. To be exhibited the work must be accompanied by a
live performance of Arvo Pärt’s passion cantata of the same name. In these
examples, one encounters transformations of a reproducible medium into
something singular for reasons other than art market viability. Rather, the
cultivation of rarity occurs through the integration of non-reproducible
elements and out of a strong conviction regarding the conditions under which
the work should be seen. In addition to being fascinating works worthy of attention
in their own right, my wager is that such extreme iterations of cinema qua
event have much to teach film theory about notions of site-specificity and
performance in an era of unprecedented image replication and circulation. Though
the moving image is inherently reproducible, what would it mean to instead approach
it from the side of rarity?